People first. Process second. Results that last.
I specialize in what I call Software Delivery Excellence: the conditions that allow software development organizations to build the right things, ship them reliably, and learn from what they learn. The House of Software Value Delivery is the organizing structure I use across that work. It separates the attributes of high-performing software organizations, e.g. Transparency, Alignment, Focus, Accountability, Maintainability, Scalability, Quality, from the actionable tools that impact those attributes: the technologies, rituals, and cultures within the organization.
The framework is a diagnostic tool as much as a model. Most organizations aren't failing because their engineers aren't good. They're failing because the conditions for good work aren't in place. Unclear priorities. Invisible bottlenecks. Plans that stop at the sprint boundary. Decisions that get made and then immediately relitigated. I've seen the same patterns across organizations at every stage, and I know which ones to look for.
I have an unconventional background, and I've stopped apologizing for it.
My tech career started at Dell, where I spent six and a half years moving through roles that had almost nothing to do with each other on paper: functional test engineering, software development, manufacturing process improvement, and supply chain management. I kept moving because I kept getting bored — not because the work wasn't interesting, but because I could see what needed to change and couldn't reach it from where I sat. That tension between seeing the problem and having the authority to fix it is something I've thought about ever since. It's part of why I've been deliberate, as a leader, about giving people real ownership.
What those years actually gave me was a systems thinker's education before I had a name for it. Test engineering taught me to think about how to make things more resilient before they break. Lean manufacturing taught me to find the waste in a process and measure what removing it actually costs and saves. Supply chain taught me cross-functional tradeoffs at scale — the kind where optimizing one thing silently breaks something else. By the time I moved into software leadership, I wasn't just a software engineer who had learned to manage. I was someone who had spent years asking "why does this process work this way, and how could it work better?" across very different kinds of systems.
In parallel with my corporate career, for over a decade, I stage managed and produced more than 25 theatre productions, including with the Zilker Summer Musical in Austin — a $300K production with 100+ volunteers and independent contractors and every possible way for something to go wrong on opening night. Stage managing is the art of making other people's vision a reality. You are responsible for everything and have authority over very little. You learn to read rooms, influence without authority, and hold a team together through uncertainty. The leadership qualities I'm most known for today — psychological safety, empathy, the ability to keep people moving through hard things — I didn't learn in a corporate training. I learned them in a rehearsal room.
In 2015, I joined athenahealth, still very much a person with two careers. That changed in the summer of 2016, when I was at work and realized I didn't want to leave to go to the theatre. For someone who had centered her life around productions for over a decade, that was a signal I couldn't ignore. I called curtains on my theatre career and leaned fully into tech.
I spent the next 10 years at athenahealth, including as Executive Director of Engineering and PMO at epocrates, leading a globally distributed organization of 70+ engineers and operations professionals. It's where the House of Software Value Delivery was born — the framework I created to diagnose and improve delivery ecosystems.
I believe process is not a four-letter word. I believe slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I believe emotions are a feature, not a bug, in any organization that wants to do hard things with real people. And I believe the best leaders I've worked with share a particular quality: they make the people around them better at their jobs, without making it about themselves.
That's what I try to do, whether I'm embedded as a fractional leader, running a consulting engagement, or on a stage.
If any of this sounds like what you're looking for, I'd like to talk.
